Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2006 made this issue crucial for close to all counties. Hence “drought action plans”
have become generalized. These anticipate periods of water scarcity and propose rules
to attenuate their consequences or to decrease their occurrence. These protocols
involve three main institutions: the administrative authority legitimate to restrict water
use (the Prefet and administrative services), a drought committee gathering various
water users, and an infrastructure used for assessing the situation, including its rules
of use and the knowledge about other users it encapsulates. The drought committee
meets up in winter time, out of crisis period, to discuss and occasionally adapt the
infrastructure. They also meet up during crisis to discuss the current situation,
restrictions activated in consequences (according to what had been agreed upon in
winter time), and possible derogations. Infrastructure entails deciding whether there is
a crisis or not, and in case its severity. This implies formalizing:
•
thresholds of water levels in specific places (exact place and choice between
groundwater or surface water) characterizing situation of droughts,
•
protocols to acquire the knowledge on water levels to be compared with thresholds,
•
A partition of county into subsystems to cope with diversity in resource availability
and uses within county, each of them having their own sets of thresholds of
referential water levels.
2.2
Diversity of Indicators and Thresholds
In practice, several drawbacks occur, including information gathering and processing.
According to farmers, the existing partition is not at a fine enough grain to cope with
the diversity of perceptions. They push for a more subdivided partition, conflicting
with another trend -and demand- for more solidarity and equity among water users at
a larger scale. Farmers know water levels from the places where they pump water,
and from what they see in their farm, where they pump water or along their way to the
county main city (to go to the committee meeting for example). Stakeholders more
concerned by ecological concerns, including representatives of fishermen, observe for
example the length of river with no running water. Representatives of administration
have a few automated monitoring places, but sometimes less than the number of areas
in the partition, due to their cost. Thresholds are characterized from statistics on past
chronicles. But due to lack of data, they are often engineered from proxy data and
adapted. This situation leads to mistrust in the drought management institution and
requests for postponing implementation of restriction rules.
2.3
Consequences for Enforcement of Rules
Hence, the implementation of these local “Drought action plans” consists permanently
in crafting adjustments to reality of situations and needs, evolving with experience,
needs and knowledge. Water users tend then to criticize or even disqualify the
institution because of three reasons: observation of existing adaptation with the rules,
uncovering of the uncertainty behind data used to implement the rules, disagreement
with the suitability of drought observation compared to their own observations. This
third source of disqualification maybe due to observation of rules applied to other
